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LATIN AMERICA FORUM

THE PROJECT

The project works to promote the study and research related to the development
and "contamination" of psychoanalysis which is living and evolving outside
the current boundaries of where it is dispersed.

The debate around this issue takes place both in meetings of the groups and in international conferences.

Psychoanalysis currently finds itself in a crucial moment that is
apparently contradictory: on the one hand it has to ever increasingly
engage with pharmacological therapies and with psychological techniques
that are significantly different from itself, on the other, it is
expanding in countries very distant from the historical psychoanalytical
culture. Asia and the Muslim countries now consider it to be very
important from both cultural and therapeutic points of view. It is
no longer a question of dialogue with other disciplines, but one of
establishing a comparison between different anthropological positions.
We have to understand whether psychoanalytical concepts are universal
and if its therapeutic methodology is effective in different countries
worldwide.

We can ask ourselves what might happen if today Freud and Jung were to
repeat the voyage they made to the United States in 1909. It was then
that Freud said, “ They don’t realize that we are bringing them the
plague.” We have to ask ourselves if psychoanalysis still has the same
powerful force and if it can overturn the traditional vision of mankind
and dethrone him from his omnipotent position. Surely the current
questions for psychoanalysis are more complicated than in the past. The
world is now dominated by technology that subverts the perception of the
body, by the new organisation of the family and group which enforce a
new geometry of the mind and by global violence. The answers to
these new realities are different from country to country, thus,
psychoanalysis has to provide different answers. In the Western world,
where we can see a fragmentation of the subject, psychoanalysis should,
above all, help to recompose the Self. The individual tries to find not
only a personal meaning but a collective one. On the contrary, in the
Eastern world people are oppressed by totalitarian regimes which
suffocate individuality. For this reason psychoanalysis is asked to free
them from this control of the group. The Iranian psychoanalyst Gohar
Homayounpour opposes “the unbearable lightness of being” of the West to
the unbearable weight of the Eastern experience .

Is psychoanalysis able to meet different needs without giving up its
methodology? Is it a problem of “translation” between different cultures
and religions? The birth of psychoanalysis was strongly characterized
by its founder’s “spirit of the age”, and within the culture of that
time Freud made some very sharp choices as regards his hypotheses. For
example, he used a Greek version of the mythological Sphinx to build his
hypothesis about the Oedipus constellation. He also used different
historical interpretations which differed from tradition such as Moses’
Egyptian origin. He made use of both existing material from the culture
of the day and personal inventive solutions, something that often
happens in scientific creation or thought in general.

We are not talking about adopting relativism, which instead of favouring
contact isolates every thought and culture in its own particular
dimension, but making anthropological models dynamic, including those in
the Western world where psychoanalysis was born, and then put them in
contact with others with their respective problem areas of the present
day. In this sense, psychoanalysis must not be transplanted but “put to
work” in the various contexts, in its dual role towards psychoanalysis
and also outwards, in such a way that they may also highlight any
changes that cultural influence causes both to the models and to the
clinical aspects.